Go and do likewise!

Address given on Sunday 10th July 2022, the 4th after Trinity, in St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan church.

Have you ever had your wallet stolen or your bag snatched?

I hope not, but most of us have at one time or another. If it has happened to you, you will understand my mixed feelings of foolishness, helplessness and fury, when I discovered my wallet had been stolen when I was on holiday once in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. I was angry with myself for allowing it to happen. I felt helpless, with no money, no plastic cards and no driving licence, in a foreign country where I couldn’t speak a word of the language. The restaurant manager, the police and our hotel staff were all very sympathetic and helpful - just as they would be in Ireland if the same thing happened to a visitor here, I’m sure. And I still had my passport, and Marty had her plastic cards so we could continue our holiday. Yet my fury with the thief only grew as I began to deal with all the hassle.

But I wasn’t mugged and left half-dead, like the man the Good Samaritan helped in today’s NT reading.

Let’s reflect a bit on the familiar Good Samaritan story told by Luke (10:25-37).

The story was prompted by a lawyer, we’re told – a learned professional man – who asks Jesus ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ – in other words, how must I behave to be worthy of God’s favour. Jesus bounces the question back at him, saying ‘What does God’s law say?’ When the lawyer answers, ‘Love God, and love your neighbour as yourself’, Jesus agrees with him, saying ‘Do this and you will live.’ After all, as both Matthew (22:37-39) and Mark (12:31) tell us, Jesus had said as much himself when asked what the greatest commandment was.

But then the lawyer chances his arm again, asking Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ It is in reply to this that Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan.

The key to the story is that Jews despised Samaritans and did not associate with them. They were heretics who did not follow Jewish law, untrustworthy, outside the pale. We might compare them to Travellers or Muslims in our society. And Samaritans felt the same about Jews.

We all remember the bare bones of the story. A man travelling from Jerusalem to Jericho is robbed and left for dead. A priest and a Levite travelling on the same road both pass by on the other side, ignoring his plight. (A Levite, by the way, was someone privileged to help the priests in the Temple – a bit like a Diocesan Reader, I suppose!) Then a Samaritan comes along. He stops and helps the traveller. He treats his wounds, and takes him to a safe place, even paying for him to be cared for. When Jesus asks which of the three was a good neighbour, the lawyer replies, ‘The one who helped’ – it seems the lawyer cannot bring himself to even speak the word Samaritan. Jesus tells him, ‘Go and do likewise.’

Jews of Jesus’s time understood very well their obligation to protect and care for their neighbours in need. ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’, is a quotation from the law given to Moses in Leviticus (19:18) – it is a command from God. But many people then as now questioned who fell into the category of neighbour.

To suggest that a Samaritan could be a neighbour, and a good one, would have shocked Jesus’s Jewish audience. I can just hear them saying, ‘Surely God doesn’t expect us to love Samaritans! They aren’t good people like us, their beliefs are wrong and their habits disgusting. We don’t like them, and they don’t like us’. Jesus must have sensed that the questioning lawyer was someone like that.

Jesus’s own view of the matter is perfectly clear. 

Through his story Jesus teaches the lawyer - and through him us too - that every human being is our neighbour – we must love them as we love ourselves, whoever and whatever they are. Even Samaritans. If a Samaritan can be a good neighbour to a Jew, so should a Jew be to a Samaritan.

Loving God is not enough; God wants us to love our neighbours too. No doubt the priest and the Levite both loved God. But for whatever reason neither could bring himself to help the robbed man. Perhaps they feared touching a man who might be dead would make them unclean according to Jewish law, or perhaps they just did not want to get involved. They passed by on the other side - they did not behave like loving neighbours.

It does not matter who we are or who our neighbour is, it is our response to their need that counts for God.

To follow Jesus means we must love our neighbours as ourselves, and every human being is our neighbour.

And this truth has consequences for us today.

We are emerging from the disruption of the Covid epidemic. Short-sighted government policies of all parties have allowed a tragic housing crisis to develop over years. And the evil attack by Russia on Ukraine has thrown the global economic system out of balance causing shortages of food and energy.

In our own country, many, many neighbours are falling into need. Thousands cannot find an affordable home. Tens of thousands of refugees who have lost everything seek safety among us. Hundreds of thousands will suffer fuel poverty and food poverty this winter.

And then there are the hundreds and hundreds of millions in other countries in desperate need, who are also our neighbours.

Neither you nor I as individuals can meet all their needs. But if each one of us reflects on what we can do, however little it is, and alongside millions of others we do what we can, we will make an immense difference. The kingdom of God will be brought closer.

As Christians we cannot pass by on the other side of the road. Jesus calls us to practical action to relieve our neighbours’ distress to the best of our ability. He calls us to be Good Samaritans - ‘Go and do likewise’. What will you do? What will I do?

Who is my neighbour?

Address given at St Mary's Nenagh and Killodiernan on Sunday 14th July 2019, the 4th after Trinity.

Jesus’s story about the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) is so familiar that it is easy to miss his main point.

It is more about recognising who our neighbour is, than about loving them as ourselves, important though that is. And his words would have shocked those who heard them first.

The story was prompted by a lawyer, we’re told – a learned professional man.

He asks Jesus ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ – in other words, how must I behave to be worthy of God’s favour. Jesus bounces the question back at him, saying ‘What does God’s law say?’ When the lawyer answers, ‘Love God, and love your neighbour as yourself’, Jesus agrees with him, saying ‘Do this and you will live.’ After all, as both Matthew (22:37-39) and Mark (12:31) tell us, Jesus had said as much himself when asked what the greatest commandment was.

Jews then understood very well their obligation to protect and care for their neighbours in need - as they still do. ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’, is a quotation from the book Leviticus (19:18) – it is a command from God.

But then the lawyer chances his arm again, asking Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ It is in reply to this that Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan.

Let's remind ourselves of the story.

A man travelling from Jerusalem to Jericho is robbed and left for dead. A priest and a Levite travelling on the same road pass by on the other side, ignoring his plight. 

Incidentally, a Levite was a layman privileged to help the priests in the Temple – a bit like a Diocesan Reader, I suppose!

Now it may shock us, the thought that men of God like the priest and the Levite should ignore a person in such obvious need. But it would not have shocked those who heard Jesus. According to Jewish Law, contact with blood, or worse a corpse, made a person ritually impure. If the priest or the Levite had touched the man left for dead, they would have become ritually impure, and so unable to discharge their religious duties. Those who heard Jesus would have understood that it was better by far for the priest and the Levite to pass by on the other side, leaving the man to be cared for by someone else – a neighbour. They would expect nothing less.

But then an outsider comes along, a Samaritan of all people, who stops and helps the traveller, treats his wounds, takes him to a safe place, and even pays for him to be cared for. When Jesus asks which of the three was a good neighbour, the lawyer cannot bring himself to call the good neighbour a Samaritan, replying, ‘The one who helped’. Jesus tells the lawyer, ‘Go and do likewise.’

To accept help from a Samaritan as a neighbour – that is what would have shocked a pious Jew at that time.

So just who were these Samaritans?

The Samaritans worshipped the Hebrew God, YHWH, but they believed that YHWH had chosen Mount Gerizim near Nablus, not Jerusalem, as the site of his holy temple. That was where they worshipped and where Samaritan priests made the traditional sacrifices. They used variant texts of the Pentateuch, the first 5 books of the Hebrew scriptures, but they rejected the rest. The Samaritans believed they followed the true religion of the ancient Israelites prior to the Babylonian Exile, preserved by those who remained in the Land of Israel. Whereas the Jews who returned from exile had brought back a changed and perverted religion.

When Jesus was alive up to a million Samaritans lived alongside but apart from the Jews in their own villages in what we now call Palestine and Israel. But history has not been kind to them. They suffered centuries of persecution and forced conversion, first by Byzantine Christians and then by Arab and Turkish muslims. Yet a small Samaritan community of almost 1,000 still remains today near Nablus in the West Bank, faithfully maintaining their own distinctive faith.

In Jesus’s time, Jews despised and disliked Samaritans. They were heretics who did not follow Jewish law, they were unclean, untrustworthy, quite outside the pale. And the Samaritans no doubt heartily returned those sentiments. Both groups had as little to do with each other as they could – neither saw the other as their neighbour.

Jesus makes the shocking point that every person is a neighbour to be loved, even despised Samaritans.

Many people in our society today find it just as hard as the Jews in Jesus’s day to accept some people as neighbours.

Take Travellers for instance. It is not so many years ago that one of the Nenagh RC priests bravely insisted that a sign saying ‘No Travellers’ should be taken down in the cinema. Anti-traveller prejudice among settled people still makes life very difficult for Irish Travellers, despite their recent recognition as a distinct ethnic group.

Or consider asylum seekers. Surely it cannot be right to keep people in direct provision centres for years on end on a dole of €19 per week, denying them the right to work and contribute to society, even to cook their own food for their families. There are fears for the safety and welfare of children in these centres, and once children reach the age of 18 they are denied funding to take up college places, and left in complete limbo.

And then there are muslims. Muslim’s in Ireland, as elsewhere in Europe, are suffering increasing harassment and attacks on the streets. How often do we hear derogatory comments about Islam, how often do we hear someone remark that ‘they are all terrorists’, which is quite untrue.

We cannot claim to be followers of Jesus unless we accept that all these and many more others different from us are our neighbours. We have an obligation to be good neighbours to them, to protect and care for them when they need it. And when we hear others express crude prejudice about them, we should confront it and not collude with it.

The Samaritan crossed the boundaries of prejudice to help his neighbour – may we ‘Go and do likewise’.